Well, Christmas Day and New Years Eve are over, but the Christmas Season is still with us. My decorations are still up, my unadorned pre-lit Christmas tree still standing and received Christmas cards are still displayed in my entry. Another whirlwind Christmas behind me and New Year resolution to not wait until the last minute (again!) to prepare for this great and busy holiday.

Not all of my cards were hand made this year as time seems to always get the best of me, so my offerings were a mixture of both hand made and store bought cards. My challenge for the last few years has been to make cards using mostly “scraps”. After teaching classes for years, I tend to have a lot of leftovers needing to be used.
Here are some of my Christmas Card Creations using scraps for 2014~

Last week, I posted a layout that I had started of my trip to Colorado 21 (yikes!) years ago.

After playing with it and not being happy with the lettering, I decided it needed a few minor face lifts.The gray lettering did not show up as well in real life as it did in my pictures, so I put some black letters over the gray, leaving a bit of a gray “shadow”. I also added a thin, black rectangular line around the word box in the bottom left.

In the original layout, I had tried to use white rub-ons for the date (after the picture was taken) on the circle to the right of my photo. They ended up cracking and I didn’t like that look for this LO, so I had to change out that circle with a different one and it worked out really well with the black lettering. I looks a little more balanced and I think I will leave it alone for now!

My next page was a challenge at first, because of the faded Polaroid pictures.

After sweating and swearing playing with it for an entire day and having to step away for a few hours, it came together very nicely, and I am very happy with the way it turned out. (These snaps were taken by my late husband at the Park and Ride on our way to SEA-TAC Airport, so they are very special to me.)

I have been in a scrapbooking mood again, thank goodness, after a long hiatus.

I don’t scrap in order, I usually just do what I feel inspired to do at the moment. This has its pros and cons in that I forget a lot of detail if I wait too long, but with constraints on my creative time, I have learned to accept it and be happy to at least have the pictures!

Right now, I am working on a trip that I took to Colorado with 4 other gals in 1993. I am so glad that I wrote dates on the back of the photos! Scrapping this event and reminiscing about the beauty that is Colorado has been very enjoyable and makes me want to return…like, NOW!

Our first night in Colorado was spent in Denver, where we were all welcomed at my friend Kathy’s sister-in-laws house. The next day was spent visiting some very fun places, including Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. After a very nice stay in Denver, we went on to Breckenridge, where we stayed the remainder of our time in a nice condo that we rented.

I got to visit beautiful and interesting places, many of which I will be scrapbooking.

I have started started several 8×8 pages of my trip, which is not my usual 12×12 style, but while working at re-vamping my studio, I came across an empty 8×8 album and thought that the paper contained inside would work well with the theme I had in my head. The pages I have started working on still need some detail filled in as I remember them, so definitively a work in process as most (if not all!) of my scrapbooks are.

Below is an example. I designed this page of the trip about 10 years or so ago. Definitively a process! In a way, it’s fun to see how my style has evolved~ this page would probably look a lot different if I were to re-design it today.

I decided to update my blog today. It has been a while, and the weather is rainy and gray out, so this is a good excuse opportunity to work in my studio!

I was surprised to find that it had been almost a year since I actually posted an update. Then I realized that I had posted another in December but had never published it! So….I published it today, almost a year later :)

I don’t think I have talked about it on this blog, since I keep Camano Card Maker a paper crafting related blog, but I will say that I lost my husband almost 3 years ago this January (he was only 56). This has changed my entire life, including the amount of free time and energy I can devote to paper crafting. I won’t go into too much detail because I have another blog, Flourishes and Bling, where I discuss personal and everyday related topics. So, over the last few years, I have been trying to find my way in my new life by trial and error. It is most often challenging, sometimes empowering, always scary and never boring! The trauma of losing my husband so unexpectedly pretty much squelched much of my creative juices and put more time demands on me since I am doing the work of two people alone now.

I hope that I am getting to a place where I can find the creative energy to start playing with paper and fabric again. Having said that, I have been trying to do a little scrapbooking, which was very painful and still is. I completed a page a few days ago, the first one in a long time, with him in it. Old pictures are easier, so that is what I am starting with.

I got most of my cards done (in a last minute frantic rush of forced creativity! ) and have once again resolved to start cards in January. This busy season catches me off guard every year and I vow, “never again” and every year it catches me off guard…again.

Here are some of my last minute

The pictures aren’t the best, but they turned out really cute, I promise! :)

Birthdays always encourage me to not only take pictures, but to look at old ones. I have bins of pictures waiting their turn to be put into a scrapbook, and I finally finished a page that I had started 4 years ago!

I had done the first layout pretty soon after James’s 4rth birthday and had started the one of Leona and Dayla and never finished it until today. I had put their pictures onto patterned paper and for one reason or another, that is as far as I had gotten. I have quite a few more pictures to scrap of that 4rth birthday party at Beringer Farms Pumpkin Patch, but I am pleased with how these two layouts turned out.

After a long hiatus from crafting, I’ve been chomping at the bit to get inky again!

As I was watching Kristina Werner video tutorials I got a birthday card idea for my grandson’s birthday which I needed the next day.

Simple. I have tons of paper, I would just CASE her idea and no problem. She used an adorable banner die from Simon says Stamp to make a candy corn banner. It was so cute I just knew I could find paper similar to hers, cut some triangles and there you go!

After spending all Tuesday evening and all day on Wednesday working on that blasted card, I finally found a font for the word “birthday” that I thought worked with the overall card, even though it was not EXACTLY what I was looking for. I can’t tell you how many alphas from my stash that I went through; dies, chipboard, bottlecaps, stickers, stamps, Cricut, you name it!

Then there was the color. Do I use black or orange, maybe white??? I thought black glitter chipboard stickers would look cool! Too bad all of mine were too big for that spot on the card where I wanted to put it. Poo. Then I got the idea of taking my last piece of Doodlebug black glitter paper and make my own, with my Tim Holtz “word play alphabet” die. What a genius I am! That is until I ran it through my Vagabond machine with the paper facing the wrong way and all the letters were backwards!!! I wanted black glitter, dang it, if I flipped them over to the other side, they would be glossy white. Aaaaaarrrrh!

SO. I still have the other half of my 12 X 12 paper, so I ran it through again, this time being very careful to place the paper the correct way and voila! Perfect black glitter letters! Except for one thing. Too big for the placement on the card.

At this point, I thought “You know, it’s OK to go out and buy a card, even though you have enough supplies to put Jo-ann’s, Michael’s, Hobby Lobby, AC Moore and Archiver’s to shame, but it really is OK. Well, NO, IT WAS NOT OK. I was going to make this card if it took me to his NEXT birthday!

This is what I finally ended up with, which is much different than Kristina’s card, which is fine, except that I REALLY liked hers…

The pictures are not the best, actually,they are horrid, but I just clicked a couple of quickies and ran out the door, closing the door to the craft supply tornado that was my room.

Since I did not have the SSS die that KW used, I made due with the “merry and bright” Christmas tree from PTI and a smaller trangle die from Spellbinder’s Media Mixage. I used white twine for the banner string, colored my candy corn with copics, then decided to glitter the orange and white part, I used Art Institute Hot Lava glitter, and Great Impressions Sparking Ice. The stamp is also from Great Impressions. I used my Cricut cartridge “Plantin Schoolbook” for the letters and used a Y19 Napoli Yellow Copic marker to color them. (Which by the way made them VERY wet and hard to stick onto the card even though I had put them through my Xyron machine. I used paper tape for the binding because it was very thick c/s from my stash and was cracking a bit. Not sure I really like it, wouldn’t do it again. To finish it off, I used one of my Viva Pearl pens to make the little accent pearls. It was either cream or ice white, not sure. Not sure if anyone cares what supplies I used, I listed them FMI In case I ever want to CASE my own card!